Illinois Spent 110 Years on Cumulative Voting

From 1870 to 1980, an Illinois voter walking into a polling booth could give all three of her votes to a single candidate for state representative. Or split them — two for one, one for another. Or distribute them across three. The math, called cumulative voting, was written into the 1870 state constitution and survived eleven decades.

The mechanic was simple. Each Illinois House district elected three members. Each voter had three votes to distribute as she liked. "Plumping" all three on one candidate — the maneuver the system was designed to enable — let a minority faction concentrate its weight. In a district that broke 70-30 for one party, the 30 percent could still send a representative to Springfield by piling votes on a single name. The House routinely contained Republicans from Chicago and Democrats from downstate, an outcome single-member districts almost never produced.

The end came on November 4, 1980. Voters approved the Cutback Amendment, championed by Patrick Quinn under the slogan "Fire 59 lousy politicians with one shot." The House shrank from 177 seats to 118, the three-member districts were halved into single-member districts, and cumulative voting was gone. The argument was partly cost, partly anger at a legislature that had recently voted itself a pay raise.

Political scientists are still arguing about what Illinois lost. The legislature became more partisan and more geographically polarized after 1980 — predictable, since that was the system's whole design. The minority-protection feature went with it.